Looking Back At The Giant Leap - Apollo 11

Brainstorms Led To Practices' Realism

Of all the words spoken to Mission Control by astronaut Neil Armstrong on that epochal afternoon 20 years ago today, it was a remark of boyish innocence that carried a special thrill for Randy Harris.

"I see my shadow," Armstrong said as the Eagle closed to within groundhog-spooking distance of the barren lunar surface.

Moon shadows were among the predicted unearthly phenomena Harris helped the Apollo astronauts try to prepare for in the Apollo mission that would kick the fiction out of Jules Verne.

Harris remembers his boss, Don Hewes, climbing into fake craters with cans of everyday black spray enamel at a mock moonscape about the size of a football field at NASA-Langley Research Center in Hampton.

Hewes created the pocked, gritty stage at Langley in the mid-1960s, so astronauts could practice in life-like surroundings.

"He painted the shadows to correspond with the time of the actual moon landing," based on calculations of the moon and sun at the time of the landing, Harris said.

To enhance the realism, flight simulations were conducted at night, next to a wall of floodlights to create living shadows, Harris said.

Langley's preparations for life to challenge art were not limited to the theatrical moonscape. They included a giant crane where a lunar module training device could be dangled, and where astronauts could practice moonwalking, at one-sixth the Earth's gravity.

Hewes, who died in 1985, headed lunar landing research at Langley for Project Apollo. He was a stickler for realism.

When it was time for the astronauts to take over, Hewes cooked up a more tactile desolation.

"We used slag from a blast furnace mixed with concrete" to repave the area, using molds to create the craters, said Harris.

He recalled that when Armstrong went through the simulated landings several months after the Apollo 11 mission, the astronaut pronounced the simulation - complete with shadows - virtually identical to the real thing.

Lunar landing research was Langley's reward for prevailing in a three-way NASA bureaucratic slugfest to determine how the astronauts would get to the moon: by direct rocket flight or by a lunar lander jettisoned from a mother ship orbiting either the Earth or the moon.

Langley's sales pitch for the latter method emphasized that a craft that needed only enough fuel to reach its mother ship in moon orbit would be cheaper and safer than methods championed by other NASA researchers that called for the lunar lander to carry everything to the moon that it needed for the trip home.

Controllability of the landing vehicle designed by the Langley scientists would be similar to a helicopter's, except that because the moon is airless, rocket propulsion would have to lift the vehicle instead of rotor blades.

And with moon gravity one-sixth that of Earth's, the astronauts had to adapt to much subtler controls.

An intricately delicate reunion between the landing craft and the mother ship in lunar orbit would be the crucial ticket for the moonwalking astronauts' return flight.

To surmount these problems the small, loosely organized cadre of Langley engineers were forced to brainstorm a new technology.

In the Langley airport hangar they built a makeshift planetarium, projecting stars on a plastic dome while test pilots sat on a rotating gun turret "spaceship" to get the feel of heavenly movement.

They replaced the turret with a more sophisticated device called LOLA - Lunar Orbiting and Landing Approach simulator - and eventually with a machine, suspended from the ceiling, which actually docked with a scaled-down version of the mother ship, or command module.

The initial burden for devising a method to simulate lunar landing conditions fell on Hewitt Phillips, a native of Port Sunlight, England, who had been at Langley since 1940 and is now a distinguished research associate there.

Phillips and his colleagues had been fiddling with jet aircraft design when the U.S. Space Act of 1958 pointed their thinking toward the cosmos. By mid-1963 he headed the center's space mechanics division.

Even though the Mercury missions had barely flown, and the Gemini craft hadn't left the ground, it was time for Langley's researchers to figure out how to land on the moon.

Modestly acknowledging that it was his idea to dangle the landing craft from something - "To an engineer it was pretty obvious that's the way it should be done" - he said the real question was how to do it.

"Since we knew that the moon's gravity is one-sixth that of the Earth's, we needed to support five-sixths of the vehicle's weight to simulate the actual conditions on the moon," he explained.

Other requirements included maintaining a constant vertical tension on the cables as the landing simulator, powered by small hydrogen peroxide engines, moved up and down on computer-controlled pulleys, and horizontally on rolling cranes.